Soul Belief and Psychology*

Some years ago Rank perceived that in psychoanalysis the present moment must be made the center from which to work outwards in order to attain valid results in theory and therapy. This is in contrast to the previous method of reconstructing the given present from a hypothetical past, where the results obtained are clearly conditioned by the therapeutic needs of the moment. By this conception Rank has been able to revalue the entire analytic situation and the conclusions to be drawn from it in a way that seems destined to make it possible to cope better with its inherent but hitherto insolvable contradictions.

In the analytic situation we have given at any moment “a group of two,” a help seeker and a therapist and a dynamic process which soon takes on the appearance of a conflict, which it is the apparent purpose of the analytic procedure to resolve. The difficulty comes when one tries to define the nature of the conflict and what we mean by resolution. Nevertheless if the therapist keeps quiet and confines himself to observation, it soon becomes apparent that the patient in his talk, is carrying on a duologue with an antagonist which is internal to himself but which he treats as if it were the analyst.

In whatever conscious terms this conflict is being carried on, if it is regarded purely dynamically, then the most general terms possible describe it as a conflict in which the patient is trying to express a will against a counter force, which is either consciously or unconsciously, a sense of guilt. This is the “will-guilt” conflict, and it underlies any material whatever that is brought up as content in the analysis. This it does to such an extent that any question as to the truth or reality of such material is purely relative to the dynamics of the will-guilt situation involved. The question arises as to whether this holds true also of the analyst; does he have a will-guilt conflict? The answer is “yes!”